This post is excerpted from The Necessity of Character: Moral Formation and Leadership in Our Time, edited by James Mumford and Ryan S. Olson.
Lasting moral formation should be measured not in decades but in generations—in the ability of one generation to pass its moral ideals and practices on to the next. But what are we doing today that will significantly influence the world of our grandchildren? How do we foster the conditions conducive to a truly enduring moral and ethical order?
There are innumerable lessons one can draw from history, but the story of William Wilberforce (1759–1833) and the Clapham Sect community with which he was significantly associated is surely one worth recounting in our time—both for its successes and its shortcomings. A celebrated British political and social reformer, Wilberforce is known today primarily for his efforts toward the abolition of slavery. This, however, was only one of his two “life goals.” As he wrote in his journal in 1787, “God Almighty has set before me two Great Objects: the suppression of the Slave Trade and the Reformation of Manners.”1 His and the Claphamites’ mixed record with regard to that second great object parallels the concerns of my present reflections.
Spanning the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the world that Wilberforce inhabited could be cruel. Under the pressure of rapid industrialization and urbanization, the everyday conditions of housing, labor, social services, medicine, education, and criminal justice for common folk were wholly primitive by today’s standards. Politicians, reformers, and assorted civic leaders working for improvements in these spheres were well intentioned, but they lacked the material and moral resources to realize their ambitions. Notably, the compassion they spoke of was, for those outside their own social milieu, selective at best. The stain of slavery within the English-speaking world remained the most visible reminder of how blind the exemplars of their society were to their own moral failings.
Wilberforce was, for good reason, the most famous of the English abolitionists. He sacrificed much and risked even more in his single-minded commitment to holding Christian England to its espoused ideals. Though a great monument honoring Wilberforce was raised in the English city of Hull a half century after his death, more significant than any such edifice was the tight network of friends and colleagues he worked with, individuals bound together in supporting the cause, each making essential contributions to the abolitionist movement that eventually made the difference.
Emerging as a community of like-minded souls associated with Holy Trinity Church in the village of Clapham, south of London, first under Anglican vicar Henry Venn and then his son John, the group included such figures as banker and philanthropist Henry Thornton, lawyer and parliamentarian James Stephen, journalist Zachary Macaulay, educator and pamphleteer Hannah More, movement organizer Thomas Clarkson, scholar Granville Sharp, and brewer and parliamentarian Thomas Fowell Buxton. As in so many moments of transformational change, the dismantling of the English slave trade was achieved not by one individual but, as the sociologist James Davison Hunter has put it, by a closely knit network of leaders coming together in common cause.2 Or as the historian John Pollock directly observed, “Wilberforce’s life is proof that a man can change his times, though he cannot do it alone.”3
In this case, what bound this network together was a strong commitment to the nonconformist elements of English Christianity that found expression in Methodism for many working-class Britons and high Anglicanism for the upper orders of British society, including the wealthy merchant class, the gentry, and the aristocracy. That commitment led them to the shared conviction that slavery was a sin and had to be abolished.
Their dogged determination to alter the temper and character of English society (and, by means of this endeavor, the larger world) faced entrenched opposition and terrible odds, but they ultimately prevailed, first through the passage of the Slave Trade Act of 1807, which banned the practice throughout the British Empire, and then, just three days before Wilberforce’s death, the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which freed all British slaves.
The Clapham Sect was exemplary of the fact, as Niall Ferguson has written, that “often the biggest changes in history are the achievements of thinly documented, informally organized groups of people.”4
The rest of this essay is available in The Necessity of Character, available from Amazon.
